Frost Advisory
- Jan 29, 2021
- 2 min read
by Beth Gilstrap
Last year, I picked ten or twelve green tomatoes. I love the craggy look of heirloom varietals and I stacked the little ones on top of their bulbous orange cousins to ripen on my kitchen windowsill. Few of my plantings from the first few days after C passed thrived. I thought the garden would bloom spectacular from the amount of emotion I left in that dirt. Lush. Heavy blooms. Straw mushrooms under the peppers and okra after a good rain. Ordinarily, the garden is a place I can see the impact of my efforts. What careful pruning can do for raspberries. How egg shells, rinsed and dried and crushed in my hands, feed the compost and sometimes reappear when turning soil, white and brown flecks of calcium breathing and breaking down amid fat, blue-blooded worms. I am tender with them, the worms. I have never forgotten the moment I cut into one with an Xacto knife in fourth-grade science—how I wished I could shrink myself down and hold each of its three hearts and squeeze life back into them. In truth, I speak to them before I start digging, hoping not to maim or kill. Perhaps my panic and grief caused an abundance of acidity in the soil that summer. I no longer live in the house with the garden I cultivated for nine years. I have rented a 120-year-old shotgun house five-hundred miles away. I think about its architecture, how it was designed for maximum air flow and minimum frontage, my postage stamp of a yard, and the potted tomato plant with two fruits I must harvest tonight. How the husband I left behind helped me lift it into the U-Haul.
Beth Gilstrap is the winner of the 2019 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize for her second full-length collection Deadheading & Other Stories (forthcoming 2021). She is also the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly, The Minnesota Review, Hot Metal Bridge, and Wigleaf, among others. She has no idea why Geminis get such a bad rap.
